Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Week 8--In Cinco de Abril

hey so i havent read any emails yet but im going to write mine first cuz otherwise i forget everything and dont write every much...so here goes.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TAYLOR!! hope it was fantastic!! ur an adult now! how does it feel?!

so this week was Dieciocho de septiembre, which is their independence day here, so we had a ward party all day wednesday with Chilean dances and food and games and such, pretty fun :P we found a great empanada place afterwards on the way home and we decided empanadas de queso are delicious but we DO NOT like ones with pino, a weird meat and such thats just gross. but of course one of the inactives wanted to make us some because my companion told them i hadnt tried any homemade pino empanadas yet so now we have some in our fridge that we will have to try sometime...haha fantastic..

also they barbeque all week, TONS of meat, for the holiday (which basically lasts all week), and we ended up having two lunches on thursday because one of the less active families that we visit a lot got us cake and also barbequed for us and they serve SO MUCH meat when they barbeque that we literally had to eat like four steaks..it was pretty bad...lol

during the ward party, we invited a random woman and her granddaughter off the street and they ended up coming, which was exciting, so we had some nonmembers there as well as a bunch of our inactives! Our ward here is fantastic compared to some of the others here in Chile, ive heard. We reached our goal for attendance last week at church and had 209 people in the chapel! the members are all super welcoming and helpful and some of them even speak english :P like our ward mission leader who served his mission in sandy, utah. my challenge to you guys this week is to go ask the missionaries in the ward if they need help and make an effort to befriend or at least welcome every inactive or investigator that comes. i never understood the importance of this until i came here cuz we can work all week to get the people to church, but once they are there we can only hope that the members befriend them and make them want to come again...

its pretty cool the relationships we have with the menos activos though, they love the missionaries and we visit them at least once a week. the only problem is that some of them dont come to church unless the missionaries visit them..they are basically converted to the missionaries, not the gospel, and they get offended if we dont visit them all the time, even if they are too lazy to get up for church..kind of frustrated.

The other group of people we work with a ton are old ladies..lol seriously we as sister missionaries spend entire days just going from lonely old woman to the next. its nice to feel so appreciated and feel like you are helping someone not feel lonely, but we are supposed to be reaching out to men, too because the church needs more priesthood leaders, we have lots of faithful woman :P

our zone leaders are super intense and promised us that if we fasted yesterday that we would reach our goals for the month, so we are hoping things will get better and we will find more new investigators to teach because this week was hard becasue everyone was busy with the holiday and woudnt answer their doors or were all busy and lots of our appointments fell though...but one of the days we had walked around for hours knocking doors and no one would answer and we were frustrated but then at the end of the night we found a man who answered and invited us in and turns out his teenage son was a member and we invited him to church the next day and he came! we have decided that when we find people like this who havent been active in years and arent even on the records and reactivate them, its basically a baptism :P there are so many people that were baptized in the past or tricked into baptism even by missionaries in the past without even knowing the covenant they were making or without even a testimony of the restoration (one of our menos activos..)! so our work is centered in finding these people, helping them gain a testimony and come back. its a new program from the church that is only being implemented in a couple missions..then we find new people to teach through the menos activos and such, their friends and family, etc

we have one investigator who is ready to be baptized but refuses to get married until jan or feb of this next year..it kills us. she is golden and has a great testimony and goes to church every week, she just has had bad experiences with a past marriage and is scared of marriage. she, like many other people here, has lived with her partner for like 30 years and has grandkids with him but isnt married..i dont understand it..why woulnt you get married if you have lived with someone that long and have kids with them and such? lots of people here are like that..i think it has something to do with the legality of marriage here..

as for my companion, shes awesome! she was even born in walnut creek and has family in San fran! haha

also i gave up on all my shoes haha the cheapest ones i got are the ones i wear everyday cuz i have so many blisters...haha ironic

as for my spanish, i can understand so much now! especially when people are talking about the gospel because that is the vocab i know...i understand everything in church and most things people say,..i still have a ways to go before i can speak or understand people when they talk fast about other stuff, but ive learned a ton!

also i got all your mail when i got here!! thanks for all the letters and birthday pictures :P and the package and such! and tell Aunt Ann thanks for the book she sent! i read all the stories and loved it!

if you send another package anytime soon, i need a spanish hymnbook and more hymns sung by Vocal Point or BYU choirs and printed pictures of you guys! i wish i had brought more pictures to show people... but dont worry about it now, i know its expensive to send stuff, just next time you are sending something.

love you guys! sorry my camera broke for good so i have to buy a new one today, so ill send pictures next week.